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Its interest rate hikes are hurting consumers and workers while bypassing the main source of inflation
The Fed is meeting today. Tomorrow, presumably, it will raise interest rates again in its continuing attempt to stem inflation by slowing the economy.
But the Fed’s rate hikes aren’t working. Despite seven straight increases in just nine months, totaling a whopping 4.25 percentage points — a pace not seen since the Fed’s inflation fight in the 1980s — price increases are still hovering near four-decade highs. The Consumer Price Index measure climbed 7.1 percent in November compared to a year earlier.
The Fed’s rate hikes are slowing the economy, but not prices. Why not?
The Fed’s failure to stem inflation is partly due to events outside the United States — Putin’s war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown, and post-COVID demand worldwide exceeding worldwide supplies of all sorts of materials and components.
But it’s also because domestic inflation is being driven by profits, not wages. And interest rate hikes don’t reduce profit-driven inflation — at least not directly. Instead, workers and consumers take the hit.
Labor costs increased 5.3 percent over the past year. But prices rose more than 7 percent. This means the real purchasing power of American workers continues to drop.
Forget the 1970s wage-price spiral when real average earnings continued to rise for much of the decade. Now, workers are taking it on the chin.
Profits have grown faster than labor costs for seven of the past eight quarters. As Paul Donovan, chief economist for UBS’s Global Wealth Management, wrote last week, “today’s price inflation is more a product of profits than wages.”
Corporate profits surged to a record high of $2.08 trillion in the third quarter of this year, even as inflation continued to squeeze workers and consumers. Over the last two years, quarterly profits have ballooned more than 80 percent, from around $1.2 trillion to more than $2 trillion.
Executives of big companies across America continue to tell Wall Street they can keep prices high or raise them even higher. As Pepsi Co. financial chief Hugh Johnston said on his company’s third quarter earnings call, “ [we’re] capable of taking whatever pricing we need.”
Not every business is raking it in, to be sure. Most small businesses aren’t sharing in the profit bonanza because everything they need for putting stuff on the shelves has gone up in price.
But the big ones have never done as well.
In fact, rather than slowing corporate price increases, the Fed’s rate hikes seem to be having the opposite effect.
It’s not hard to see why. If I run a big corporation, I’m not going to lower my prices and profits in the face of a pending economic slowdown. I’ll do everything I can to keep them as high as possible for as long as I can.
I’ll reduce my prices and profits only when the Fed’s higher rates begin hurting consumers enough that they stop buying stuff at my high prices because they can find better deals elsewhere.
Yet if I have a monopoly or near-monopoly — as is increasingly the case with big American corporations — my consumers won’t have much choice. If they want and need my stuff, they’ll continue to buy at the higher prices.
Of course, I’ll keep telling them I have no choice but to keep raising my prices because my costs keep increasing — even though that’s bunk because I’m increasing my profit margins.
Eventually, the Fed could raise interest rates so high that the cost of borrowing makes it impossible for consumers — whose wages, remember, are already dropping, adjusted for inflation — to afford what I’m selling, thereby forcing me to stop raising my prices.
But by this time, people will be hurting. Many will have lost economic ground. Some will have become impoverished. A large number of jobs will have been lost.
The Fed should stop believing it can easily stop profit-price inflation by hiking interest rates. It should pause interest-rate hikes long enough to see — and allow the nation to see — they’re harming workers and consumers more than corporations that continue to rake in record profits.
The government should use other means to tame inflation. Like what?
Like windfall profits taxes as California’s governor Gavin Newsom has proposed for oil companies there, and Representative Ro Khanna and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse have proposed nationally (taxing the difference between the current price of oil per barrel and the average cost between 2015 and 2019).
Like tough antitrust enforcement aimed at reducing the pricing power of big corporations (as Lina Kahn is attempting at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter is trying at the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department).
Like a new antitrust law that allows enforcers to bust up big corporations (and prevent them from buying other businesses) when they’re powerful enough to continue raising their prices higher than their costs are rising. (Could Republicans in Congress be coaxed into supporting this? I believe so.)
It’s important that Americans know the truth. Seven Fed rate hikes in just nine months have barely dented corporate power to raise prices and profit margins.
Which is why the Fed is putting the onus of fighting inflation on workers and consumers rather than on the corporations responsible for it.
This is wrong. It’s bad economics. It’s insane politics. And it’s profoundly unfair.
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Children's torture chambers found in liberated territories, says Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets (photo: Anna Voitenko/Reuters)
The Russian torture chambers designed for children have been found in the liberated territories, Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said on Dec. 14.
“For the first time, we’ve recorded the torture of children. I thought it was impossible to reach a new low after (the massacres in) Bucha, Irpin.”
Lubinets said that he had personally seen two torture chambers in Balakliya, which were located one opposite the other.
“One boy had stayed there for 90 days,” he said.
“He said that he was tortured: they (the Russians) cut him with a knife, heated metal and burned a part of his body, several times he was taken out to be shot and they shot over his head. He heard the screams of women and men being tortured around the clock. I thought that was the worst.”
However, according to the ombudsman, they saw even worse in the liberated city of Kherson.
“In one of the torture chambers, we found a separate cell where children were kept,” he said.
“According to the people who were kept there, they knew that there were Ukrainian children next to them. The invaders themselves called it a ‘children’s cell.’ This is a damp room, it differed only in that they threw (on the floor) very thin carpets, saying they were for the kids.”
Lubinets said the children had been given drinking water every other day, with almost no food. In addition, the kids were subject to psychological pressure by the Russians, who said that their parents had “abandoned” them and that they “won’t return” to them.
“One boy was detained while taking a photo of Russian equipment on his mobile phone, and he was kept in a cell and tortured,” the official said.
Lubinets said the Russian military apparently believed that these children were “resisting” the Russian invasion.
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The Federal Correctional Institution is shown in Dublin, Calif., Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. (photo: Jeff ChiuAP)
Thomas Ray Hinkle, a high-ranking federal Bureau of Prisons official, was sent to restore order and trust at a women’s prison wracked by a deplorable scandal. Instead, workers say, he left the federal lockup in Dublin, California, even more broken.
Staff saw Hinkle as a bully and regarded his presence there — just after allegations that the previous warden and other employees sexually assaulted inmates — as hypocrisy from an agency that was publicly pledging to end its abusive, corrupt culture.
So at a staff meeting in March, they confronted the then-director of the Bureau of Prisons and asked: Why, instead of firing Hinkle years ago, was the agency keen to keep promoting him?
“That’s something we’ve got to look into,” Michael Carvajal responded, according to people in the room.
Three months later, the Bureau of Prisons promoted Hinkle again, putting him in charge of 20 federal prisons and 21,000 inmates from Utah to Hawaii as acting western regional director. Among them: Dublin.
MULTIPLE ALLEGATIONS
An Associated Press investigation has found that the Bureau of Prisons has repeatedly promoted Hinkle despite numerous red flags, rewarding him again and again over a three-decade career while others who assaulted inmates lost their jobs and went to prison.
The agency’s new leader defends Hinkle, saying he’s a changed man and a model employee — standing by him even as she promises to work with the Justice Department and Congress to root out staff misconduct. And Hinkle, responding to questions from the AP, acknowledged that he assaulted inmates in the 1990s but said he regrets that behavior and now speaks openly about it “to teach others how to avoid making the same mistakes.”
Among the AP’s findings:
— At least three inmates, all Black, have accused Hinkle of beating them while he was a correctional officer at a Florence, Colorado federal penitentiary in 1995 and 1996. The allegations were documented in court documents and formal complaints to prison officials. In recent years, colleagues say, Hinkle has talked about beating inmates while a member of a violent, racist gang of guards called “The Cowboys.”
— One inmate said he felt terrified as Hinkle and another guard dragged him up a stairway and slammed him into walls. Another said Hinkle was among guards who threw him to a concrete floor, spat on him and used racist language toward him. A third said Hinkle slapped him and held him down while another guard sexually assaulted him.
— The Bureau of Prisons and Justice Department knew about allegations against Hinkle in 1996 but promoted him anyway. The agency promoted Hinkle least nine times after the alleged beatings, culminating in June with his promotion to acting regional director.
— At least 11 guards connected to “The Cowboys” were charged with federal crimes, but not Hinkle. Three were convicted and imprisoned. Four were acquitted; four pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate. Hinkle was promoted twice before the criminal investigation was over.
— In 2007, while a lieutenant at a Houston federal jail, Hinkle was arrested for public intoxication at a music festival after police say he got drunk, flashed his Bureau of Prisons ID card and refused orders to leave. After the case was dropped, the agency promoted Hinkle.
— Hinkle has also come under fire as a senior agency leader. The Justice Department rebuked him in March after he was accused of attempting to silence a whistleblower, and the Bureau of Prisons said it was taking corrective action after he impeded a member of Congress’ investigation and sent all-staff emails criticizing her and the agency. Three months later, he was promoted to acting regional director.
— The Bureau of Prisons, already under intense scrutiny from Congress for myriad crises and dysfunction, did not publicize Hinkle’s promotion. Instead, the agency left his predecessor’s name and bio on its website and refused requests for basic information about him.
The AP has spent months investigating Hinkle, obtaining more than 1,600 pages of court records and agency reports from the National Archives and Records Administration, reviewing thousands of pages of documents from related criminal cases and appeals, and interviewing dozens of people. Many spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation or because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Together, they show that while the Bureau of Prisons has vowed to change its toxic culture in the wake of Dublin and other scandals — a promise recently reiterated by the agency’s new director, Colette Peters — it has continued to elevate a man involved in one of the darkest, most abusive periods in its history.
`WE ARE ALL HUMAN’
The extent of Hinkle’s alleged misconduct and his subsequent rise to the upper ranks of the Bureau of Prisons has never been revealed. The AP’s findings raise serious questions about the agency’s standards, its selection and vetting of candidates for top-tier positions, and its explicit commitment to rooting out abuse.
“As a minimum, the music festival incident, handling of the whistleblower, and the congressional investigation exhibit his extremely poor judgment,” said Allan Turner, a former federal prison warden who reviewed the AP’s findings.
“This should have been a red flag for any promotion board and is certainly not the appropriate level of judgment expected of someone serving in a leadership role in a correctional institution or in a region,” said Turner, a research professor emeritus in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
This story is part of an ongoing AP investigation that has uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department’s largest law enforcement agency with more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and an annual budget of about $8 billion.
AP reporting has revealed rampant sexual abuse and other criminal conduct by staff, dozens of escapes, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies.
In response to detailed questions from the AP, Hinkle conceded that he beat inmates as a correctional officer but said he has made significant changes to his life since then, including seeking professional treatment and quitting alcohol. He said he was disciplined — a two-week suspension for failing to report abuse of an inmate — and that he cooperated fully with investigators.
“With the support of my friends, family, and colleagues, and through professional help, I have made the most of my opportunity for a second chance to serve the Bureau of Prisons honorably over the past twelve years,” Hinkle said.
“I cannot speak to why some are dredging up history from so many years ago, but my distant past does not reflect who I am today,” Hinkle added. He “vehemently and categorically” denied using racial slurs, targeting whistleblowers and any recent allegations of misconduct.
“My story I share with my fellow staff has more to do with hope and change after getting help and not self-medicating with alcohol,” Hinkle said. “We are all human and make mistakes. There is no shame in admitting our problems and seeking help.”
The Bureau of Prisons responded to detailed questions about Hinkle with a statement from Peters defending him and the agency’s decisions to promote him.
“Mr. Hinkle has openly acknowledged his past mistakes, gone through the employee discipline program, sought professional help and reframed his experiences as learning opportunities for others,” Peters said. “Today, I am confident he has grown into an effective supervisor for our agency.”
At the same time, Peters said she remains committed to working within the agency and the Justice Department and with Congress “to root out staff misconduct and other concerns.”
The AP also filed requests with the Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act for background information on Hinkle, including his job history, work assignments and official photograph. The agency claimed it had “no public records responsive” to AP’s request.
The agency also denied a request for Hinkle’s disciplinary records, saying that “even to acknowledge the existence of such records … would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
‘ONE OF THE ORIGINAL COWBOYS’
Hinkle showed no privacy concerns when he stood up in front of his boss, wardens and union brass and told them what he had done.
It was 2020. The new regional director, Melissa Rios, was holding court at regional headquarters in Stockton, California. Suddenly here was Hinkle, her deputy, talking at length about how he brutalized inmates long ago.
“I am one of the original Cowboys from Florence,” Hinkle said, according to people who were there. He also said, according to them: “We were abusing inmates” and “we were assaulting them.”
Around the room, people looked at each other, puzzled. Was it intended as a cautionary tale? Or was he bragging?
Fresh from the Marine Corps, Hinkle was among the first wave of correctional officers hired to staff the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. The prison, opened in 1993, was part of a cluster built in the high desert 110 miles (175 kilometers) south of Denver to relieve overcrowding elsewhere. Next door, an even higher-security prison was springing up: the super-max “Alcatraz of the Rockies” for terrorists, mob bosses, drug lords and other dangerous felons.
The federal inmate population had tripled since 1980, fueled by a surge in violent crime and mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Within the Florence penitentiary’s freshly poured walls, “The Cowboys” were taking over.
One guard told a grand jury that the prison’s captain had given a “green light” for “The Cowboys” to attack inmates. In particular, “The Cowboys” ran roughshod over the special housing unit or SHU (pronounced “shoe”) — a prison within the prison for inmates with disciplinary problems.
They’d walk around wearing “Cowboys” baseball caps and leave a “Cowboys” medallion as a calling card. They’d throw a ball painted with “Cowboy Love” into a cell, wait until an inmate picked it up and then rush in and jump him.
They’d meet during off hours to talk about beatings. They’d stress secrecy, bribe inmates with cigarettes to stay quiet, and repeat slogans like “you lie ’till you die.”
In all, prosecutors said, “The Cowboys” beat more than two dozen prisoners — many of them Black — in less than three years.
BEATINGS, NO CONSEQUENCES
Hinkle was accused of assaulting at least three inmates. The allegations were detailed in court actions and formal complaints to agency officials. Two said Hinkle beat them as he and other guards brought them to the penitentiary’s special housing unit on Oct. 29, 1995, after a violent uprising at Florence’s neighboring medium-security prison.
Both men said they were in full restraints — handcuffs, chains, and shackles — and unable to protect themselves from guards wearing helmets, elbow pads and knee pads.
Marion Bryant Jr. alleged in a lawsuit, later settled by the Bureau of Prisons for $7,500, that Hinkle and other guards dragged him up a flight of stairs and slammed him into walls in a dark hallway. He said guards held his arms, tripped him, kicked his groin and taunted him with racial slurs.
“We’ll kill you if you f--- with staff,” they said, according to Bryant.
Bryant said Hinkle and another officer then carried him down some stairs, dragged him down a hall and threw him on a cell floor, where Hinkle removed his restraints and his clothing.
“I’m terrified. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me,” Bryant testified in a 2000 deposition.
Bryant, a former University of Utah linebacker, said in court documents that he sustained bruised ribs, a busted lip and injuries to his left shoulder but wasn’t seen by prison medical staff for more than a week.
Norman McCrary accused Hinkle and three other guards of slamming him to a concrete floor, spitting on him, and calling him a “f------ n---—.”
Bryant and McCrary, both in for drug offenses, were among two dozen inmates taken to the SHU in the wake of the uprising.
Bryant was accused of breaking off a table leg in the melee and swinging it at a prison worker “in a threatening manner.” He denied the allegation but later pleaded guilty to assaulting a correctional officer, adding two years to his sentence. Bryant said he was held in the special housing unit for six months after his alleged beating.
Hinkle was accused by a colleague in court proceedings of assaulting a third inmate, Reginald McCoy, around the same time. McCoy, 52, told the AP that Hinkle was among four guards who slapped him and held him down while a guard fondled his genitals.
McCoy, who also goes by the name Kojovi Muhammad and is serving a life sentence for cocaine distribution, said another guard punched him in the jaw, causing him to spit up blood and knocking his teeth out of place. He pretended to be unconscious until they left.
One guard told a grand jury investigating “The Cowboys” in 2000 that McCoy was sent to the SHU for allegedly following a female employee around, and that once he was in a holding cell, Hinkle and other guards assaulted him.
Prosecutors listed McCoy’s assault among dozens of acts in the indictment of seven members of the “The Cowboys.” They did not mention Hinkle, who wasn’t charged.
Bureau of Prisons policy bars workers from using “brutality, physical violence, or intimidation toward inmates, or use any force beyond what is reasonably necessary to subdue an inmate,” with punishment ranging from reprimand to firing.
Bryant tried to fight back through the legal system. Within weeks of his alleged beating, he filed a staff assault complaint through the prison’s administrative remedy process and later added a tort claim seeking $2 million. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division closed its investigation in February 1997, saying there was “insufficient medical evidence” and “insufficient eyewitness corroboration.”
The Bureau of Prisons also denied Bryant’s tort claim, writing that its investigation “does not reveal evidence to show that you suffered any actual personal injury as a result of negligence, omission, wrongful acts, or improper conduct on the part of Bureau of Prisons staff.”
Bryant filed a prisoner’s civil rights lawsuit against Hinkle and other officers in April 1997. The Bureau of Prisons settled with Bryant in 2003, the same year he was released from prison, but fought until after his death in 2015 to keep the terms secret.
A SECOND CHANCE AND MORE TROUBLE
Within a year of the Justice Department closing its investigation into Bryant and McCrary’s allegations, the Bureau of Prisons promoted Hinkle out of Florence.
By February 1998, he was a senior officer specialist at a low-security prison at the federal prison complex in Beaumont, Texas, northeast of Houston. The position, which was to be awarded through a competitive selection process, put Hinkle one rung below management.
Bryant had just filed his lawsuit, and the FBI investigation into “The Cowboys” was ongoing. Two years later, though, the Bureau of Prisons promoted Hinkle into management as a lieutenant at its Houston jail.
But in October 2007, Hinkle was arrested for public intoxication after authorities say he refused to leave an all-day music festival when security ejected him for not having a ticket.
“Some punk inside made me f------ leave,” Hinkle told a sheriff’s deputy, according to an arrest report obtained by the AP through an open records request from the Montgomery County, Texas sheriff’s office.
It was around 9 p.m. at the annual Buzzfest festival, featuring The Smashing Pumpkins and other alt-rock favorites, in the Houston suburb of The Woodlands. Hinkle, then 41, flashed his Bureau of Prisons ID and told the sheriff’s deputy that “he was an officer just like” him.
In that moment, though, the deputy saw Hinkle — his breath smelling of booze, defying orders to leave — as a “danger to himself and others” and told him he was under arrest for public intoxication. As the sheriff’s deputy turned him around to handcuff him, Hinkle stiffened his body and resisted, according to the arrest report. Several other officers had to help.
After 16 months, prosecutors dropped the case just before trial, sparing Hinkle the maximum penalty — a $500 fine — and, more importantly, the prospect of a criminal record.
Hinkle’s lawyer in the case, Earl Musick, said Hinkle had misplaced his ticket after entering. Musick said he found several witnesses who would’ve testified that Hinkle wasn’t intoxicated. Prosecutors decided to withdraw the case after they had trouble finding witnesses to support the allegations, Musick said.
“He was completely innocent of that,” Musick said. “They got pissed off at him for some reason and hung that charge on him.”
Hinkle stayed in Houston, where he’d bought a house and remarried, until 2012 — nearly 12 years after he’d arrived. It was his longest gap between promotions.
Then, the Bureau of Prisons promoted him again and again in rapid succession.
— In 2013, Hinkle was made deputy captain of the federal prison complex in Forrest City, Arkansas. A year later, he was the captain of the federal prison complex in Beaumont, Texas.
— In 2016, the agency promoted Hinkle to assistant administrator of the correctional programs division at its Washington, D.C. headquarters, giving him a hand in setting policies and overseeing operations at all 122 federal prison facilities.
— In 2018, the Bureau of Prisons sent Hinkle to help run its newest and one of its most dangerous facilities, making him associate warden — second-in-command — at the federal penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois. Among his duties: Overseeing staff sexual abuse training and compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Then, in January 2020, the agency sent Hinkle west as deputy regional director.
‘MESS UP, MOVE UP’?
Hinkle’s rise is a stark example of what Bureau of Prisons employees call the agency’s “mess up, move up” policy — its tendency to promote and transfer troubled workers instead of firing them.
Hinkle had never worked in the western region before and had never been a warden, often a prerequisite for a top regional post. And yet there he was, appointed to help run one-fifth of the nation’s federal lockups and given a $40,000 raise. This year, Hinkle is on pace to make $176,300, according to government data.
Employees say Hinkle has been a foul-mouthed bully who leads through fear and intimidation. Inmates allege in court filings that, on his watch, they’ve been subjected to “Cowboys”-style violence from correctional officer “goon squads” roughing them up after a hunger strike at an Oregon federal prison.
Hinkle has been accused of targeting employee whistleblowers; questioning the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic as it raged in federal prisons; defending the ex-Dublin warden charged with sexually abusing inmates; and, in an ad hoc security policy, female workers say he ordered them to take off their bras when they arrived for work.
“I’ve never heard one positive thing about the guy,” said Aaron McGlothin, president of the union at the federal prison in Mendota, California. “Everybody says the same thing,” he says — that Hinkle is “narcissistic” and “arrogant.”
McGlothin said Hinkle sent a lieutenant to videotape union members protesting understaffing last year outside the Mendota prison. Union leaders at another federal prison, in Herlong, California, said Hinkle threatened to discipline them for insubordination after they spoke up about staffing shortages.
Union representatives have complained repeatedly to the Bureau of Prisons and Justice Department about Hinkle. They’ve written to Attorney General Merrick Garland and his top deputy, Lisa Monaco, pleading for his removal, and they’ve sought help from members of Congress.
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., had her own hostile encounter with Hinkle when she visited Dublin in February. Her assessment: “He’s a thug.”
Speier said Hinkle was dismissive of Dublin’s sexual-abuse crisis — worrying more about the prison’s reputation than the inmates — and tried to block her from speaking one-on-one with women who reported abuse.
“The lens through which he looked at the issue wasn’t that this was some horrible cultural rot — it was that it was an embarrassment,” Speier said. “I think he’s risen through the ranks by being part of the team… He came off as arrogant. He just really didn’t get it.”
The Bureau of Prisons made Hinkle acting warden at Dublin in January after former warden Ray Garcia and several other workers were arrested for sexually abusing inmates. Garcia was convicted Thursday after a week-long trial.
Hinkle told Dublin staff that he was there to help the prison “regain its reputation,” but employees say his two months in charge left the facility even more tattered. They say Hinkle attempted to silence an employee whistleblower and even threatened to close the prison if workers kept speaking up about misconduct.
Employees say Hinkle met alone with a female worker who filed a harassment complaint against a prison manager, a violation of established protocols that gave the appearance he was trying to keep her quiet. Afterward, the woman said she felt blindsided and was reluctant to proceed.
The episode led to rare public condemnation from the Justice Department, which said in a March statement: “These allegations, if true, are abhorrent.”
Employees say Hinkle also showed little sense of the crisis that brought him to Dublin, wrongly claiming to workers that what Garcia was accused of was consensual sex — even though the law, which he oversaw training on at Thomson, is clear that no such thing exists between inmates and prison workers.
Hinkle left Dublin at the end of February, returning to his deputy regional director duties while a new, permanent warden took over. A week later, Carvajal was at the prison, pledging to look into employees’ concerns about how Hinkle kept getting promoted instead of fired.
Nevertheless, on June 10, Carvajal sent a memo to Bureau of Prisons staff announcing that he was promoting Hinkle to acting western regional director indefinitely. Rios, the regional director, was on leave for a family emergency and not expected back, but the agency said she returned in late September, bumping Hinkle back to deputy regional director.
And that’s where he remains, at least for now. Under Justice Department policy, Hinkle must retire next May when he turns 57. That, said Hinkle, is precisely what he plans to do.
Amir Nasr-Azadani. (photo: YouTube/20Minutos)
Amir Nasr-Azadani, 26, was arrested in November in relation to the killing of a police colonel and two volunteer militia members.
He has been accused of "waging war against God" and will be hanged, according to Iran Wire.
FIFPRO, the international soccer players union, said in a statement on Monday that it was "shocked and sickened" by the news.
"We stand in solidarity with Amir and call for the immediate removal of his punishment," it said.
There have been widespread protests in Iran since the September death of 22-year-old Amini, who died in custody after being detained by morality police on suspicion of breaking the country's strict rules around head coverings.
Witnesses accused police officers of forcing her into a van and beating her.
Nasr-Azadani last played for Persian Gulf Pro League side Tractor, but has not played professionally since his last appearance in November 2017.
According to Iran Wire, he is one of 28 Iranians who have been sentenced to death for their parts in the protests.
Among those are three children, who have all been accused of "corruption on Earth."
According to the BBC's Persian service, the three children were physically tortured during their detention.
On December 8, Iran conducted its first execution in relation to the protests.
The Guardian reported that Mohsen Shekari was executed after being accused of blocking a street and wounding a member of the pro-regime Basij militia in September.
State media published a video of what it said was Shekari's confession, which showed him with bruising on his face.
Human-rights groups, including the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights, have said Shekari was tortured and forced to confess.
The group's director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, called for a strong international reaction to Shekari's death "otherwise we will be facing daily executions of protesters."
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In Smith County, a heavily conservative county in eastern Texas, District Attorney Jacob Putman has said he would be "proud" to enforce the state's near-total abortion ban. (photo: Jeffrey McWhorter/WP)
Six months after their Supreme Court victory, conservatives complain that strict new laws are not being sufficiently enforced
Students for Life of America, a leading national antiabortion group, is making plans to systematically test the water Erin Brockovich-style in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants they say result from medication abortion.
And Republican lawmakers in Texas are preparing to introduce legislation that would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child pornography.
Nearly six months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering abortion bans in more than a dozen states, many antiabortion advocates fear that the growing availability of illegal abortion pills has undercut their landmark victory. Now they are grasping for new ways to crack down on those breaking the law.
Antiabortion advocates had hoped the June decision would significantly decrease the number of abortions in the United States. But abortion rights activists have ramped up efforts to funnel abortion pills — a two-step regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that is widely regarded as safe — into states with strict new bans, working with rapidly expanding international suppliers as well as U.S.-based distributors to meet demand.
Now many conservatives are complaining that the abortion bans are not being sufficiently enforced, even though much of the illegal activity is happening in plain sight, as abortion rights advocates seek to reach women in need. Leaders interviewed on both sides of the debate had not heard of any examples of people charged for violating abortion bans since Roe fell, a crime punishable by at least several years in prison across much of the South and Midwest.
“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who has started to speak with Republican governors about the prevalence of illegal abortion pill networks. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”
Abortion bans include penalties only for people involved in facilitating illegal abortions, not for the pregnant women themselves.
The push on the right for enforcement reflects the extent to which both sides of the abortion battle are recalibrating after a tumultuous year that has challenged many long-held assumptions about the politics of the issue — and left the state of abortion access in the United States hard to assess. Interviews with more than 30 of the most influential advocacy group leaders, policymakers and litigators on the abortion issue found that far from settling the decades-old abortion question, the fall of Roe has triggered a major new phase of combat set to play out over the next few years in courtrooms, state capitals and the next presidential election.
While a study from the Society of Family Planning found that at least 10,000 fewer clinical abortions took place in the first two months after Roe was overturned, researchers can’t say how many women were able to obtain pills through the mail. One major pill supplier in Mexico estimated that her organization is on track to help terminate 20,000 pregnancies by year’s end, while another Europe-based group says that, after the Supreme Court decision, it received roughly 3,600 queries per month, with about two-thirds of those coming from women in states with abortion bans.
Many Republican lawmakers have been reluctant to further restrict abortion since the June ruling, especially after this year’s midterm elections confirmed that abortion rights are popular with voters across party lines. Backlash from the court decision was widely credited with helping Democrats score some critical wins, including a state legislative majority in Michigan and control of the Pennsylvania House, while voters even in heavily Republican states turned out in droves to oppose antiabortion ballot measures.
Abortion rights advocates say they are exploring 2024 ballot measures in at least a dozen states to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions. Momentum is building in many states with strict abortion bans, including Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Ohio and South Dakota, according to several national abortion rights advocates with knowledge of early conversations across the country.
“Democrats should not be shy about being bold and using every tool to fight for individual rights,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who won easy reelection in a state that also voted to protect abortion rights through a ballot measure. States that have the ability to do a Michigan-style ballot initiative “should certainly be exploring it,” Whitmer said.
While abortion rights advocates appear largely united in their approach, the rise of abortion pills and the election results have combined to highlight tensions among conservatives over what to do next.
The next few months could pit the “true believers” — those who genuinely care about limiting the number of abortions — against those who back antiabortion policies to score political points, said Jonathan Mitchell, the antiabortion lawyer behind the novel Texas abortion ban that took effect in 2021.
Mitchell said he has been involved in discussions about aggressive and unconventional measures that he thinks are necessary if Republicans are determined to actually limit the number of abortions. But he is unsure whether Republicans will have the political will to pursue those ideas.
“Especially after this election, a lot of Republicans will want to change the subject, and going after abortion pills is not the way to change the subject,” he said.
Antiabortion advocates search for an ‘airtight’ case
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Texas antiabortion advocates stepped up efforts to find local prosecutors most inclined to enforce antiabortion laws.
They quickly zeroed in on Jacob Putman, the prosecutor in Tyler, Tex., a small city that bisects 200 miles of mostly open road between Dallas and Shreveport, La. Larger than a lot of other heavily conservative counties in Texas, several Texas antiabortion advocates said, Putman’s district has the resources to investigate and prosecute those who violate the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Putman is also staunchly opposed to abortion.
Since the June ruling, the prosecutor has made several public statements expressing his commitment to enforcing the state’s abortion ban. Growing up in Smith County, he told The Washington Post, he volunteered at his local crisis pregnancy center, a religiously affiliated organization that aims to dissuade women from having abortions. He and his wife have donated money to the group. As the county prosecutor, he said, he would be “proud” to bring a case against someone caught violating the abortion ban, a felony punishable in Texas by up to life in prison.
But Putman hasn’t had any of those cases. And he doesn’t expect to have one anytime soon, in part, he said, because it’s difficult to determine who is breaking the law and where the crimes are being committed.
“If it’s happening in my county, I’m not aware of it,” said Putman, sitting beneath a mounted pair of horns from a Texas Longhorn. “In order for one of these cases to get to a prosecutor’s office, someone is going to have to tell, and I don’t know who that would be.”
Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest antiabortion group, is positioning itself to help. A designated team within the organization has been searching for an “airtight” case to bring to a district attorney like Putman who is willing to prosecute, said John Seago, the group’s president.
“We’re not going to get involved until we have evidence, something credible we can take,” Seago said. “We’re trying to actually confirm who’s involved in these networks, how it’s being done.”
While there hasn’t been much evidence of enforcement since Roe fell, there is a long history in the United States of prosecuting people for pregnancy-related crimes. Between 2000 and 2020, 61 people were criminally investigated or arrested for either ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else end theirs, according to a preliminary report from If/When/How, a legal advocacy group that supports abortion rights.
Abortion rights advocates say new efforts to prosecute will exacerbate the fear and isolation of those facing unwanted pregnancies in states where abortion is banned.
“It will paralyze people from getting help and health care when they need it and are entitled to it,” said Aimee Arrambide, executive director at Avow Texas, an abortion rights advocacy group.
Seago said he hopes the upcoming legislative session in Texas — which has established itself as a testing ground for new and aggressive antiabortion legislation — will yield tools that will help antiabortion advocates in their fight against illegal abortion pills.
Texas lawmakers are drafting legislation that would compel internet providers to block people from accessing abortion pill websites like Europe-based Aid Access and other online pharmacies within state borders, said Seago, though even antiabortion lawyers say that effort would raise free speech concerns. Another proposal would refashion the enforcement mechanism behind the six-week abortion ban that took effect in Texas in 2021, empowering private citizens to enforce the law through civil litigation at any stage of pregnancy, not just after six weeks.
National advocacy groups are also pivoting to focus on enforcement. Early in the new year, Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said she plans to strategize with antiabortion governors about how best to deal with the illegal pill networks.
She said she has already discussed the matter with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, one of several GOP governors to sign a strict abortion ban and win reelection this year. According to Dannenfelser, Kemp is widely supportive and “already engaged” on the abortion pill issue.
“Every governor, especially governors who have passed ambitious laws, have it in their interest to make sure that laws in their states aren’t de facto overturned by pills going into every part of their state, through organizations that are directly violating the law,” Dannenfelser said.
Andrew Isenhour, Kemp’s deputy director of communications, declined to comment on any potential legislation, adding that the governor remains “committed to supporting life at all stages and protecting the lives of the unborn.”
Some are exploring other unorthodox approaches.
Antiabortion advocates filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November challenging its decades-old approval of one of the pills used in medication abortions. Their arguments have been widely discredited by legal experts.
Students for Life of America is focused on the environmental harm it says is caused by medication abortions, specifically from fetal remains flushed down the toilet, as often happens when women take abortion pills at home. (There is no direct evidence that abortion pills contaminate the water supply, and environmental experts have dismissed the arguments made by Students for Life.)
At an internal meeting in Indianapolis on Nov. 30 attended virtually by The Post, employees expressed frustration that state officials are not already testing the water for contaminants related to abortion pills.
“You mentioned Erin Brockovich,” said Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins, speaking to another member of her advocacy team and referencing the famous legal clerk who exposed groundwater contamination around a major gas and electric facility. “Let’s just get the damn water samples ourselves since we already know they’re not doing it.”
By the end of the meeting, the group had developed several action items, including finding a lab willing to help with testing, and recruiting a team of “student investigators.” Hawkins said she will be meeting with Republican attorneys general in the new year to discuss issuing statewide injunctions against abortion pills, based on the group’s claims about toxic wastewater.
Looking toward 2024
Abortion rights advocates are newly energized coming out of the midterms, eager to capitalize on public opinion and build on the gains they made in Michigan, Kentucky and beyond after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision invalidated Roe.
“From the day that the Dobbs opinion was leaked, until right now, a new fury has burned through the women of this country,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an outspoken proponent of abortion rights, who says she is committed to helping more states pass abortion protections.
As abortion proponents turn their attention to 2024, ballot initiatives that aim to protect abortion in state constitutions are now the “strategy du jour,” said Jessica Arons, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
But ballot measures should not be seen as a cure-all, several abortion rights advocates warned. Because of their high price tag — abortion rights advocates spent tens of millions of dollars on the one in Michigan — these campaigns can’t happen everywhere simultaneously, said the ACLU’s Rachel Sweet, who ran the abortion rights campaigns this year in Kansas and Kentucky.
In several states that allow citizens to add issues to the ballot by collecting signatures, conservative lawmakers are already discussing various proposals to make it harder to put issues directly to voters. Soon after the midterms, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose introduced an effort to require 60 percent of voters to pass certain constitutional amendments, instead of the current system, which requires a simple majority. LaRose dismissed claims that his proposal was related to the abortion issue, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
As they push for more restrictive bans in states such as Florida and North Carolina, antiabortion advocates across the country will have to contend with moderate Republicans who have been increasingly vocal on the issue. In Indiana, West Virginia and South Carolina — three states that have convened for legislative sessions since Roe fell — Republicans struggled to agree on a path forward on abortion, as moderate factions within the caucus pressed for less severe restrictions.
West Virginia Senate Majority Leader Tom Takubo (R), a practicing physician, brought debate on the issue to a standstill in July, refusing to back a bill that included criminal penalties for doctors. In private conversations with other Republican leaders, he said, he warned of a massive public backlash.
“If Republicans aren’t willing to come and meet a little bit more towards the middle, then what they’re actually doing is going to hurt their cause and cause a major swing in the opposite direction,” said Takubo, who ultimately voted for a near-total abortion ban.
Both sides of the debate are now gearing up for the 2024 presidential election, which will be critical for the future of abortion access. While President Biden has been limited in his ability to protect abortion access, an antiabortion president could significantly alter the current landscape, cracking down on abortion pills in both Democratic- and Republican-led states.
Under a Republican president, the FDA could alter the restrictions around abortion pills. For example, the agency could try to limit the period of time when patients can legally take abortion pills, from 10 weeks of pregnancy to six or seven, said Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who specializes in abortion — a move that would force tens of thousands of people every year to have surgical, rather than medication, abortions.
National antiabortion advocates are also carefully considering the ways in which a president could restrict illegal pill networks. An antiabortion president could direct several agencies to bear down on the issue, including the U.S. Postal Service, as many pills are sent through the mail, and the Department of Justice, said Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
When Dannenfelser meets with Republicans who may run for president in 2024, she said she asks them first about a national abortion ban, preferring candidates who advocate for a ban after six, 13 or 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Her next question is about the “cataclysmic problem of the abortion pill.”
“We don’t have to dictate their solution,” Dannenfelser said. “But they have to have one.”
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President Biden and first lady Jill Biden walk through the Cross Hall of the White House lit with rainbow colors following an event commemorating LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the East Room last year. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The president spoke before a crowd of thousands gathered to celebrate the federal protections in the Respect for Marriage Act.
"The road to this moment has been long, but those who believe in equality and justice – you never gave up," Biden said.
That long road is one Biden and the country have been on together. In 2004, just 42% of Americans said they were in support of same-sex marriage, according to Gallup. Today, it's 68%, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll to be released Thursday.
A dozen Republican senators (out of 50) and 39 Republican House members (out of 208) voted in favor of the legislation. That's far from a majority of Republicans, and it's reflective of the fact that rank-and-file Republican voters have lagged in support of same-sex marriage.
In 2004, according to Gallup, just 19% of Republicans were in favor. This week's NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found now that number has more than doubled to 43%, but is still shy of a majority.
A massive cultural shift on interracial marriage
When it comes to interracial marriage, the country has seen a wholesale change in public opinion and societal acceptance since 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that prohibitions on interracial marriages were unconstitutional.
In 1958, when Gallup first asked the question, just 4% said they approved of marriage between Black people and white people. Through the mid-'90s, Americans were still split on the subject.
But by the late-'90s and early 2000s, support for interracial marriage soared and, by 2021, approval hit a sky-high 94%.
Back in 1967, just 3% of Americans were in interracial marriages. That's up to 11% overall and 19% of newlyweds, as of last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
Biden's evolution on gay rights and same-sex marriage
On almost no other issue has American public opinion shifted so dramatically so quickly. Biden, who has a grandchild who identifies as LGBTQ, is included in that evolution.
In 1973, as a young senator, a gay rights activist confronted Biden about discriminatory federal regulations. Biden was taken aback.
"My gut reaction is they are security risks," Biden said of people who were gay in the military and Civil Service, "but I'll admit, I haven't given this much thought."
In the 1990s, like many other senators, Biden cast a series of votes that hurt the push for gay rights — from cutting off funding from public schools that were "encouraging or supporting homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative" to the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. DOMA defined marriage as between a man and a woman and blocked federal recognition of same-sex marriages.
Now, as president, Biden rebuked the Florida law that constrains teachers talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, calling it "hateful" and vowed to "continue to fight for the protections and safety you deserve."
And his signing of the Respect for Marriage Act Tuesday repeals DOMA.
It's been quite the turnabout — and really it's come in the last 10 years.
During the 2008 campaign, Biden, as former President Barack Obama's running mate, affirmed in a vice-presidential debate, "No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage."
It was a delicate line the Democrats were walking then. In 2004, the issue of same-sex marriage was a lightning rod. Anti-same-sex marriage amendments were put on various state ballots. Then-President George W. Bush backed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, and white Christian evangelicals helped Bush win reelection.
Democrats had moved toward the half-measure of civil unions — giving legal rights to gay couples, but, largely because of the politics, were not ready to come out fully in support of "marriage."
All that changed with Biden in 2012.
As vice president, Biden got out ahead of President Obama in advocating for same-sex marriage — on national television.
Marriage is about "who do you love?" Biden said on NBC's Meet the Press. "And will you be loyal to the person you love? ... whether they're marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals."
He continued: "Look, I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that."
With that, Biden endeared himself to the LGBTQI+ community and pushed Obama to publicly embrace the position.
Days later, Obama went on ABC's Good Morning America, saying Biden's "probably got a little bit over his skis, but out of generosity of spirit."
"Would I have preferred to have done this in my own way, in my own terms, without there being a lot of notice to everybody?" Obama said. "Sure, but all's well that ends well."
Biden's appearance came at something of an inflection point. This was in an election year and at a time when the country was still split on acceptance of same-sex marriage. Three days before he went on Meet the Press, Gallup found 50% of Americans approved of same-sex marriage.
Afterward, support continued to rise. In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in the Obergefell case that same-sex marriage is constitutionally protected by the 14th Amendment.
That night, the White House lit up in rainbow colors.
What the bill does and doesn't do
For advocates of the Respect for Marriage Act and the White House, Tuesday was a big day. But the bill's potential impact is limited.
"No, I am not celebrating," Jim Obergefell, of the Obergefell case that won the right to same-sex marriage, said on CNN.
This bill does not guarantee the right to marry. It makes it so that other states have to recognize same-sex marriages across state lines and that same-sex couples are entitled to the same federal benefits of any other married couple, like Social Security survivor benefits.
"I will say I'm happy that at least something has been done, something that we will have to fall back on should the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell in the future, but this act, I find it curious that it's called the Respect for Marriage Act because this act does not respect LGBTQ+ community, our marriages, our relationships or our families."
That's because, though the bill attempts to buttress key Supreme Court decisions, it does nothing to prevent same-sex marriages from becoming illegal again in states that might oppose them if the Supreme Court decides to overturn Obergefell.
The potential for its overturning was the impetus for passing the Respect for Marriage Act in the first place. In the Dobbs decision, which overturned the right to an abortion earlier this year, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court "should reconsider" decisions that legalized same-sex marriage and even protected the rights of married people to have access to contraception.
"If the Court were to overturn Obergefell, the legality of same-sex marriages would revert to state law — and the majority of states would prohibit it. The Respect for Marriage Act wouldn't change that, but it requires all states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and federally recognizes these marriages."
But others see this as an important step to be celebrated.
"We saw after the Dobbs decision, that in so many ways, too many of our rights are just one Supreme Court decision from being lost," Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told NPR's All Things Considered Monday. "As a queer woman, as a queer woman of color in this country, who's married, I was worried that at some point that the courts would also invalidate my marriage. Now, I'm relieved because that's not the case. Congress has taken action to ensure that our marriages are valid, that our love will be respected."
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Daniel Bangali of Coastal Environmental Watch near a patch of deforested mangroves. (photo: Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay)
Nearby, a worn white and gray church bearing the name Amistad watches over a quiet road. Sengbe Pieh, leader of the famous slave rebellion on the ship that the church was named for, was born on the island, and legend says his gravesite is hidden somewhere in the forest here.
Bonthe, and the Sherbro estuary in general, was once a major trading outpost for the British Empire, feeding what was then an emergent global economy with slave labor and, later, tropical commodities like palm oil. Now it’s a sleepy fishing town of about 10,000 people. Even reaching Bonthe is no small feat — the journey from Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, involves a series of public buses, motorcycle rides down dirt highways, and a wooden public boat that ambles across the sprawling estuary, shuttling goods and travelers between the tiny fishing villages that dot its coastline.
As the morning light shines on brightly painted fishing boats that bob near Bonthe’s main pier, it also brings into view a newer, more ominous structure. Snaking along the coastline in front of the town is a stout mound made of concrete and rocks. It’s a seawall, built a few years ago to combat the flooding that’s become common during the rainy season here. Like many other coastal towns in West Africa, the ocean is eating into Bonthe.
At this year’s COP27 U.N. climate conference in Egypt, the question of what the rich world owes countries like Sierra Leone consumed the proceedings, leading to a tentative agreement — albeit a vague one — on the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund to compensate vulnerable nations for climate-related disasters. In places like Bonthe, the loss and damage debate isn’t an abstraction. Homes are already being lost to the sea, and more upheaval may be around the corner. How much aid people in places like this will need to cope with a changing environment — and what form that aid should take — is a bitterly contested question. But it’s one with high stakes for people living in the face of floods, extreme heat, and, as here in Bonthe, an advancing ocean.
Dollar figures tend to dominate the international debate over climate finance, but Bonthe’s recent history suggests the amount of money spent on aid projects only tells part of the story. Between 2015 and 2021, the Sherbro estuary was a major focus of USAID’s flagship environmental aid project in West Africa. As part of that project, USAID and its contractors financed the planting of mangrove trees meant to combat flooding, and helped construct makeshift seawalls in some of the estuary’s small fishing villages. But just a few years after the project closed down, in the villages visited by Mongabay the aid agency’s efforts were struggling under local economic pressures or had already been mostly reversed.
With an increasingly loud global chorus calling for countries like the U.S. to spend more on helping Sierra Leone and its counterparts deal with climate change, Bonthe has a message for the world: the “how” of climate finance is just as important as the “how much.”
A bad tide rising
According to USAID, just over 200,000 people live in the 283-square-kilometer (109-square-mile) Sherbro estuary. From the air, the estuary’s coastline is magnificent, a sea of radiant green mangrove forests pockmarked with tiny villages along the edges of its churning saltwater channels. Inside those villages, people make their living fishing, harvesting oysters from nearby mangrove roots, and selling wood from their trunks for cooking and smoke-drying fish.
As in other parts of Sierra Leone, lately the weather has begun to change in Sherbro. The dry season is hotter than it was before, and the rains are arriving earlier, with more unpredictable and occasionally devastating force. At the height of the rainy season, when the estuary’s water levels are high, the ocean floods into some of the towns during storms, destroying houses and washing away people’s belongings.
“In the coastal areas there has been an increase in the sea level,” said Gabriel Kpaka, deputy director-general of the Sierra Leone Meteorological Agency and one of the country’s chief climate negotiators. “Most of these areas don’t have a seawall or a dike, so in high tide water comes into them and flooding is now common.”
In Bonthe, when the flooding started damaging homes and businesses a few years ago, the local government raised funds to build the concrete seawall that now lines its main beach. Locals say the wall is helping, and has bought them some time. But the smaller towns farther up the coastline don’t have the resources that the comparatively wealthy city does. People who live in them can’t afford to build sturdy concrete walls, and in the last few years it’s become common here for some towns to be severely damaged during recurring floods.
“In [the town of] Nyangai, with this climate change, the water level rose. Houses that were built along the beach, everything was carried away. Even the coconut trees that were planted were carted away by the sea,” said Daniel Bangali, a program officer with Coastal Environmental Watch, a small environmental organization based in Bonthe.Nyangai’s story is worryingly familiar for people here in the estuary. In Hanging Site, named for the British vessels that used to drop their anchors nearby, Miatta Moyu points to the edge of the town where a few small sand-and-concrete houses stand perilously close to the lapping waves.
“Some houses there all broke,” she said. “They tried to build a seawall, but it didn’t work. The water still came.”
In 2018, USAID published a climate change vulnerability assessment for regions like this in Sierra Leone. As part of the assessment, researchers surveyed people living near mangrove forests, including here on Sherbro Island. Vast majorities said that incidents of high temperatures, rainfall and storms had become more severe in recent years.
According to its 2021 National Adaptation Plan, Sierra Leone still doesn’t have a marine meteorological station it could use to accurately measure how much sea levels have risen in the past decade. But the plan cited World Bank estimates that say nearly 30 km2 (11.5 mi2) of Sierra Leone’s coastline could be lost to the sea by 2050, a catastrophe that would cost the impoverished nation upwards of $50 million. Sierra Leone isn’t alone in facing this threat. Across the West African coastline, entire towns are being swallowed by the ocean.
“When I joined the [Meteorological] Agency 12 years ago, there used to be flooding like every three years, but recently almost every year flooding is happening,” Kpaka said.
Largely cut off from Sierra Leone’s centers of economic activity, the Sherbro estuary is cash-poor, with few social services or opportunities for non-subsistence work. There is no electrical grid, and water is largely obtained from rivers, creeks or, if a town is lucky, a borehole well.But while climate change is a problem for people here, most have more urgent concerns. Money and education topped the list of “worries and stressors” for people surveyed by USAID, far outpacing the threat of flooding and other climate risks. Overall, environmental issues barely registered higher than mosquitoes and marital problems in the survey.
The stress of basic day-to-day needs in Sherbro helps explain why one of the best protections against climate change for people here — the mangroves surrounding their towns — are in trouble. Mangrove wood is a crucial component of how the estuary’s residents make money. It’s used to cook food, preserve fish, and build homes. When the trees are cut down too close to the towns, though, the topsoil is eroded, which can worsen their problems with flooding.
This, along with the rich biodiversity of the mangrove forests and their role in mitigating climate change — acre for acre, mangroves sequester five times as much carbon as other tropical forests — is partly why USAID chose the Sherbro estuary to work in. The aid agency’s struggles here are a snapshot of the difficulties that climate aid can face when it reaches the ground.
If a mangrove falls in the forest
Traveling through its choppy inlets by speedboat, the mangrove forests of the Sherbro estuary present themselves as endless. They stretch for miles in all directions, with their knotted roots, called “elbows,” poking out of muddy embankments that rise out of the shoreline as far as the eye can see. A 2020 assessment estimated that, overall, Sierra Leone’s mangrove forests total 1,575 km2 (608 mi2), around half of which are in the Sherbro estuary.
The mangroves in Sherbro are Rhizophora racemosa, also known as red mangroves. They provide a home to a magnificent array of wildlife, including leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea), West African manatees (Trichechus senegalensis), dwarf crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis), Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli) and 107 species of birds. African fish eagles (Haliaeetus vocifer) and other raptors prowl the skies, circling majestically over the maze-like canals that snake through the estuary.
But like in most parts of Sierra Leone, Sherbro’s mangroves are being lost. According to Sierra Leone’s National Adaptation Plan, about a quarter of the country’s mangrove forests have disappeared since 1990. In the remote Sherbro estuary, it hasn’t been quite so catastrophic — just under 10% of its mangroves have been destroyed during that period — but with a growing population it’s virtually certain that deforestation here will increase.
Most of this destruction is a product of necessity. Sherbro’s residents rely heavily on the mangroves. They provide shelter from wind and sun, and the fish and oysters that fill their dinner bowls breed in the brackish water that flows through their roots. But mangrove wood is also used to build houses and smoke-dry fish, the sale of which is a major source of income for people in Sherbro. The mangroves are a major — and, at least for now, irreplaceable — piece of people’s livelihoods. Along the coast and on the outskirts of Sherbro’s villages, the results of this pressure are visible in the form of sun-bleached clearings full of dead branches where mangrove wood was recently cut.
These clearings are also symbolic of the bind people in Sherbro are in, and its environmental cost. Without the relative safety of the tangled roots, and compounded by illegal overfishing by foreign trawlers, mangrove deforestation is causing a drop in fish and oyster populations. When wood is gathered too close to the villages, it also weakens a natural barrier against the impacts of climate change.
“Because they cut the mangroves in front of their communities, the sea level rise is eating into their [towns], and the breeze from the sea is disturbing them,” said Tom Menjor, a former monitoring and evaluation officer with USAID who helped manage the aid agency’s programming in Sherbro.
Sierra Leone’s mangrove forests were a centerpiece of one of USAID’s major environmental aid projects in recent years, the West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WABiCC) program, a $48.9 million initiative that ran from 2015 to 2021. WABiCC was a sprawling aid package that also funded forest protection in Guinea and Liberia, efforts to combat wildlife trafficking, and climate-related support for people living in Cote D’Ivoire’s mangrove regions as well.
During the time it was in Sherbro, WABiCC ran training workshops in villages on the consequences of cutting down the mangroves. Tribal authorities received stipends to attend meetings where they discussed conservation plans, and in some towns USAID funded a multiyear effort to replant some of the destroyed mangroves and build makeshift seawalls with sandbags and oyster shells.
But just a few years after the close of the project, in many of those towns there isn’t much left of USAID’s six years of work. According to Daniel Bangali, who was a municipal leader in Bonthe during WABiCC’s activities, very few of the planted mangroves survived, and without funding for their maintenance, most of the sea barriers were mostly destroyed by sun and saltwater.
“Before WABiCC left, there was a small impact,” Bangali said. “But [after they left] in other communities, it was a total failure.”
During an interview in Bonthe, Bangali told Mongabay that USAID’s project was good at broadcasting information to people about the role the mangroves played in protecting them from climate change, but it didn’t provide a way to shift to alternative fuel sources or less destructive methods of preserving fish. Thus, when the project ended, most of its activities simply faded away.
“If it had continued, maybe there would have been a reduction [in mangrove cutting],” Bangali said. “But when they left there was no other organization to continue [the work].”
According to WABiCC’s final report, as part of its climate-related activities, 25 communities in the Sherbro estuary were selected to take part in the mangrove replanting effort. Fifty-five thousand mangrove seedlings in total were planted in the Sherbro estuary.
But in the communities visited by Mongabay, most of the replanted mangroves had either died or been eaten by livestock. In Bonthe, they were simply buried when local authorities decided to use the planting sites for other forms of municipal development. Bangali said people participated in the planting efforts because they were paid a daily wage, but many of the seedlings died not long afterwards.
“When there was communal work, and [USAID] called them, they would do it. But then what happened? The people left, so [the community] reverted back to cutting mangroves,” he said.
In Hanging Site, a 30-minute boat ride up the coast from Bonthe, Miatta Moyu squints at a swampy area next to the town, gesturing toward a small patch of juvenile mangroves in the center. They’re all that’s left now of the USAID-financed planting effort. Out of 1,000 mangrove seedlings, she estimates only about 60 survived. The rest were eaten by livestock.
“People didn’t stop [cutting the mangroves],” she said. “Because it’s how we’re living, we sell the wood to cook fish, so we can’t stop. It’s not easy.”
A mid-term performance evaluation for WABiCC acknowledged the shortcomings of the project’s mangrove replanting efforts, saying that without tackling the underlying economic pressures that were forcing people to cut the trees down, planting new ones was “counterproductive and unsustainable.” Former staffers with the USAID project told Mongabay they heard much the same from people living in the towns they had worked in.
“It’s really complicated, but their focus was, ‘You can’t tell us not to cut mangroves if you don’t provide us an alternative,’” said Menjor, the former WABiCC monitoring officer who now works for a water company in Freetown.
Menjor, who visited Sherbro on multiple occasions, said the project often ran into complex and unforeseen realities on the ground. Manatees were attracted to mangrove barriers planted near rice paddies, for example, which were then destroyed by the hungry animals. In other cases people couldn’t afford to maintain the sea barriers that were built with USAID assistance.
“Just after one year, they rotted and the sandbags gave up,” Menjor said. “So the water continues today. In that one year that we had the construction, they were protected [from flooding]. But when the embankment was destroyed they were unable to fix it themselves. They said, we have sand and sticks, but we have to buy sandbags and we don’t have money.”
In other cases, bureaucratic rigidity and a narrow timeline made it hard for project staff to adapt or think creatively. When they tried to think up alternatives for one of the major drivers of deforestation — wood-fueled fish preservation — for example, their suggestions were rejected.
“We started thinking about fish smoking, and said, ‘OK, maybe they can do it with solar or something,’” Menjor said. “So we brought it up, but that was later in the project. So it wasn’t approved because it was coming to an end.”
Overall, Menjor said, community members often appreciated USAID’s work in Sherbro, but the agency wasn’t working on a timeline that was long enough to achieve lasting change.
“When we engaged and sensitized [people], they realized they were doing bad for the environment. But it became worse when we raised awareness and then pulled out,” he said.
In 2021, the WABiCC project ended. It has now been replaced by a new, multicountry USAID environmental project, but the Sherbro estuary isn’t part of that project — nor, in fact, are any efforts to address coastal climate change at all. Menjor told Mongabay that from what he’d heard, the new project was planned during the Trump administration’s time in office, which ordered USAID staff to strike anything explicitly related to climate change from the agency’s programming.
“We showed [people in Sherbro] all the ways to combat it, but it requires money,” he said.
USAID is far from the only organization to struggle with mangrove reforestation, a notoriously tricky undertaking. The latter stage of the project overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, and despite their failures in some towns, in others the agency and its contractors were more successful. In Gbongboma, a small town inland from Bonthe, for example, Mongabay saw a thriving patch of juvenile mangrove seedlings that were planted with WABiCC funding on the town’s outskirts. The initiative also funded a vast repository of data and analysis on Sierra Leone’s mangrove forests, much of which was used as source material for this article.
But Bangali said the project’s fundamental problem was that it was disconnected from the day-to-day lives and needs of Sherbro’s residents. Decisions about what to prioritize and how to achieve its goals were made far away, with little collaboration or input from those struggling to adapt to climate change in the region, and whose behavior WABiCC sought to change.
“When coming, instead of you planning alone, you should sit and plan with the community people,” he said. “If you let the project be owned by the people themselves, they will see the importance of it.”
In a statement emailed to Mongabay, USAID declined to say whether the shift away from Sherbro and coastal climate adaptation programming had anything to do with the policies of the Trump administration, and said there had not been an independent final monitoring and evaluation report for WABiCC that might indicate how many of the 55,000 seedlings it planted actually survived.
The agency said the mangrove replanting in Sherbro was only one component of a much larger aid package, which included helping the Sierra Leonean government design its climate adaptation plan and an effort to set up small-scale savings and loan programs in the estuary.
“We are continuing to consider the impacts of these programs and future endeavors,” a spokesperson for the agency added.
Beyond the numbers of climate finance
After a tense year of demands for rich countries to make good on their promises to fund the Global South’s climate response, November’s COP27 conference nearly fell apart as negotiations over what those countries owe the rest of the world turned bitter and acrimonious. At the eleventh hour, a breakthrough concession was offered by G7 countries: they would permit the establishment of a standing “loss and damage” fund, tacitly acknowledging their responsibility for climate change and the debt they owe to vulnerable countries for the catastrophes it is causing.
But little progress was made toward achieving the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit). And while 2022 was the year when a long-demanded loss and damage fund was finally created, there is still no agreement on who will finance it and what it will look like in practice. To put the fund in context, this summer’s climate-related floods in Pakistan were estimated to have cost upwards of $30 billion. Yet the largest concrete commitment at COP27 was just $262 million from the European Union — less than 10% of the cost of that one disaster alone.
As the impacts of global warming gain momentum in places like Sierra Leone’s Sherbro estuary, questions over how deep the U.S. and other wealthy nations are prepared to dig into their pockets have taken center stage. But USAID’s work here shows that dollar amounts only tell part of the story. The agency’s struggles suggest that who shapes and controls climate and conservation aid is as important as how much it costs, if not more so.
“There are people here who know that climate change is happening,” said Kpaka, who has represented the world’s Least Developed Countries at international climate negotiations. “But I’ve had personal engagement with them, and they think they don’t have any alternative way of doing things.”
In Sierra Leone, addressing the consequences of climate change may require major changes to the way some people live and survive. If USAID’s experiences in Sherbro are a guide, that will require money — potentially a significant amount of it — but also a long-term plan that they buy into and play a role in shaping.
In many respects, the global economy was born in places like Sherbro Island, where the trade in enslaved people gave rise to a commodity boom that fueled the growth of Europe and the United States. Now, the ships of Sierra Leone’s former colonial masters lie rusting on its beaches, slowly being reclaimed by the oceans that carried them there. But the presence of the societies that built them can still be felt in the increasingly urgent lapping of the waves before them, and the angry, unyielding glare of the sun above.
“I’m worried about our present situation, but also extremely worried about the future, especially for our children yet to come,” Bangali told Mongabay. “If during our own time, things have been gotten so much worse like this, so much hotter, and we are manhandling the environment, then the activities of our children will be even more destructive than ours. By the time we pass away, I wonder what is going to be their own fate?”
As I prepared to leave Hanging Site, a young man whom I’d interviewed earlier tapped me on the shoulder. In a soft voice, he said, “I have a question to ask you.” And after a long pause. “Do you know how we can stop the flooding here?”
With COP27 now in the books and the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C increasingly looking like a relic of a more hopeful era, the honest answer is: no. But what the world might still be able to do is keep the floods from destroying people’s lives here, and help them protect their environment without deepening their day-to-day struggles. Whether that help arrives, and what shape it takes, will say much about what the future will look like here and in towns that look like Hanging Site across the world.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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